Robert Irvine will fix your failing restaurant… or bench press it. One or the other.
Before we had kids, my wife and I had this thing called “free time.” We would have time in the day where we were caught up on chores, didn’t need to work, and had nothing scheduled. In early 2021 with two kids living at home, such a thing seems like an absolutely foreign concept. But back when we did have free time, we would occasionally watch TV – and one show we liked to watch was Restaurant Impossible, a show on Food Network starring Robert Irvine that struck a difficult balance of appeasing my wife’s interest in cooking and design and my interest in business performance and turnaround. In each episode, Irvine visits a restaurant with bleak prospects and redoes the menu, the décor, and more often than not addresses staff issues.
One of the things that I’ve always enjoyed in the show is seeing how customer service basics play out in the real world – or at least as real as you get on basic cable reality TV. The same themes keep playing out over and over across the several seasons of the show. Sometimes the restaurant has a product problem and the food is bad. Other times, the service from the staff is horrible or the interior is atrocious and off-putting. How Irvine tells the owners of the restaurants what he sees and what he wants to fix is interesting, primarily because they almost always argue with him – as if he has no idea what he’s doing despite having owned and operated several restaurants AND having a television show (that they agreed to be on) where he repeatedly helps restaurants turn around.
In one episode there is a particular exchange between Irvine and the owner that I remember being fascinated by. In it, Irvine has told the audience that the food is quite bad, and asks the owner/cook if he ever eats the food in his own restaurant, to which the reply came “No, not really.” The look that Irvine gives him is predictably funny and if I remember right, they did the record scratch sound effect (or maybe a dramatic drum beat) right afterwards to note to the audience how crazy that is. And of course, we all recognize that this is insane. If you’re cooking something (even just at home) the first rule of not being bad at cooking is to taste the food you prepared. For a chef to not eat their own product is both kind of comical and also a hugely missed opportunity to make sure that your customers are being satisfied.
This extraordinarily basic concept of consuming or experiencing your own product should be the cornerstone of any quality control process. For a restaurant, that certainly starts with the food as most people would argue that the food is the primary reason you visit a restaurant, unless we’re talking about Rainforest Café where the primary draw is seeing the robot monkeys (at least it better be when you’re paying $13.00 for the same tater tots you can get at Walmart for $1.88). The point is you want to make sure the food is something your customers will enjoy, so eat the food to make sure it’s good. This is so basic a concept that the notion of eating made it into the tech world; we will often say we’re “eating our own dogfood” to mean we’re using our own applications to force ourselves to live with them.
Of course, the food isn’t the only criteria we evaluate a restaurant on. I’ve been to restaurants that I won’t be back to because the service was poor or the place smelled like a wet dishrag. In fact, there have been a few restaurants that I’ve left without ordering because the service was so poor. Once we almost left a restaurant after we’d already ordered because a half hour after ordering drinks, we hadn’t gotten them and only then did they inform us they’d run out of an ingredient and sent a bus boy to the store to get it – 15 minutes away. Much as a restaurant isn’t just about the food, your responsibility as an IT pro isn’t just about the app working either. Let’s start by looking at the macro level of an entire department, and then I’ll zoom in and we can look at an individual IT employee.
See the care that he’s putting into plating? Do you think he’d send those out if he didn’t think they tasted right? How do you think he knows? He couldn’t… taste it, could he?
First, let’s examine the department level. Look beyond the simple functionality of the applications you support. How are the phones answered? Is it friendly and polite? Does your call center team listen to their customers’ (often other company employees’) problems intently? Do you feel like they actually care? Having run a service organization for some time I can tell you from experience that you can fix the problem and still have a dissatisfied customer because they were treated brusquely or indifferently. Even before the call, how easy is it to reach IT? Do you hide behind a wall of automated attendants and byzantine email filters and ticket systems, or does someone take ownership of a request or incident right away?
How about your processes for different requests? Really try to see how your customers will interact with your whole department, and make sure you aren’t making it harder than it absolutely needs to be. For instance, do I need to read through pages of instructions to get my iPhone on the corporate network? Do you make me get random approvals that aren’t really necessary just because that’s how you’ve always done it? How about getting access to a certain application – do I need to fill out three pages of paperwork in triplicate and submit it to HR? What about infrastructure? Is it an act of congress to get a few new VMs setup to support a new project sponsored by the finance group? Is there a way to make it less painful? To leverage our restaurant analogy, you need to make sure that you aren’t making it difficult for people to order food or see the wine list. If you are, they aren’t going to want to come back.
Of course, we probably should talk about the IT “food.” Are your apps stable and do they perform well? How about your different cloud apps – did you integrate them well and is your SSO environment robust and highly available? Do you have your most critical apps and data protected appropriately? And just like a restaurant, can you handle the special requests? For instance, if someone needs an exception, can you handle that in stride and with grace, or does that cause real problems for them and you both?
The point I’m trying to drive home is that you absolutely, positively need to see your operation from your customers’ perspective. I made a point to set a standard design principle that in any applications or infrastructure, if we have to decide between making our customers’ lives harder or making our lives harder in IT - we will always choose the latter. Again, like a restaurant I’m much less concerned about how much more difficult it is to plate something beautifully than it is to just slop it in a bowl; it’s our job to make sure our customers have a great experience – and working in IT is no different.
I know many of my readers don’t feel like they can impact the entirety of IT, so let’s just talk about a single vSphere admin role – something I’m really comfortable talking about given that I did that job for a while. First, spend some time thinking about who the people are who depend on you and ask you for things – those are your customers. Now, how efficiently and professionally do you respond to requests from them? When you are in meetings with them do you actively listen and pay attention to their needs and what they are asking for? Do you do your best to hit deadlines so that anything they need to do isn’t held up because of IT? Ultimately, the real question is whether or not you are earnestly and honestly striving to serve your customers to the best of your ability. If you can answer yes in good faith, then you are probably doing a great job – but try to experience working with you through the eyes of the people that you are serving. Would you like working with you? If not, you need to take some corrective actions right away. If you really don’t know and can’t see it, you can always resort to the simplest way to tell – ask them. Ask for feedback humbly and often and you’ll be able to have a great sense of where you’re going.
Don’t underestimate the importance of asking your customers about their experience.
Related: the Boston airport bathrooms have these little smiley faces that you can press on the way out to let them know how the bathroom was. Chances of me ever actually coming in physical contact with one of those buttons in an airport bathroom? 0%
The Walt Disney Company’s Parks and Resorts division is obsessive about experiencing their own products from their customers’ perspective, which is why they are constantly surveying people in their parks. They also encourage their executives to dress like tourists and just visit the parks as a guest. Was the parking experience well run and simple? How was the entry gate? Was the food good? Were the rides well-managed? You can do the same thing in IT; you just have to try to experience working with yourself and/or your department as a customer. I work in a small IT shop and as a visible leader I can very rarely interact with people on my team without being known, so I ask other people in the company to call and ask for things and let me know how it goes – I use them as mystery shoppers. The point is, I’m always trying to find out what it’s like to work with me and my team and constantly try to up our game to improve the experience.
The chef/owner of the restaurant we were talking about earlier was missing an easily seized-upon opportunity to ensure that his customer experience was something they’d want to pay for and ultimately repeat: making sure the food was tasty. Of course, he could have taken it further and tried to experience the entire restaurant as a customer – walk in the door, be seated in a booth, look around, read the menu, etc. The point is, he didn’t care – and his restaurant was failing as a result. It’s your job as an IT professional to see your projects, programs, and systems through the customer’s eyes – if you don’t, your customers may end up leaving you too.
And if you need it made even more clear: an IT pro without customers is called a former IT pro. Don’t take your eyes off the ball and make sure you see whatever you are responsible for through your customers’ eyes.
Questions for Reflection:
Have you ever interacted with a business and wished you could tell the owner what went wrong or right because you think they’d like to know?
What is it like to work with you? What parts are more painful or less pleasant than they should be?
How can you improve your customers’ experience in working with you? What can you do tomorrow, next month, and next year to improve that experience?
